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Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 37:2 (2022) ► pp.291–320

On the influence of Kreyòl swa

Evidence from the nasalization of the Haitian Creole determiner /la/ in non-nasal environments

| The University of Alabama
The Haitian Creole (Kreyòl) spoken by bilingual speakers is a prestigious form of speech generally referred to as Kreyòl swa (KS), where Frenchified features (e.g. front rounded vowels) are often used. In contrast, monolingual speakers use Kreyòl rèk (KR), a variety in which Frenchified features do not generally occur (Fattier-Thomas 1984; Valdman 2015). In this article, I establish the nasalization of the definite determiner /la/ in non-nasal environments (LÃ), e.g. chat lan for chat la ‘the cat’, as a feature of KS. I show that while bilingual speakers do use both Frenchification and LÃ, monolingual speakers overuse nasalization as compared to bilingual speakers, but use Frenchification less than the bilingual group because it is harder to produce. Based in these findings, I suggest that the sociolinguistic situation of Haiti is more complex, i.e. it is extended beyond the relationship between French and Kreyòl.
Keywords: Haitian Creole, definite determiner, variationist sociolinguistics, Frenchified HC, Kreyòl swa, Kreyòl rèk, nasalization, LÃ
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Haiti’s sociolinguistic situation
    • 2.1Kreyòl and French
    • 2.2Attitudes and ideologies toward Kreyòl and French
    • 2.3Variation in Kreyòl and attitudes toward its particular varieties
    • 2.4 Kreyòl swa: KS
  • 3.The nasalization of /la/ in non-nasal environments, or LÃ
    • 3.1The distribution of the Kreyòl determiner /la/
    • 3.2Previous studies on LÃ in Kreyòl
    • 3.3Variationist sociolinguistic account of LÃ
      • 3.3.1Methodology
      • 3.3.2Data gathering using PIE
    • 3.4Measures
      • 3.4.1Dependent variables: Frenchification and nasalization
      • 3.4.2Independent variables
        • 3.4.2.1Key independent variables
        • 3.4.2.2Speaker’s social factors
        • 3.4.2.3Linguistic factors
    • 3.5Analytical strategy
  • 4.Results and interpretation
    • 4.1Descriptive statistics
      • 4.1.1Part I: Frenchification and nasalization of LA in non-nasal environments
      • 4.1.2Part 2: The nasalization of /la/ or LÃ in PIE
      • 4.1.3Significant differences (Chi2 test) among speakers by task and among task by speakers
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00096.tez
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